In Frame
At Onassis AiRInterrupted Futures: Artists in the Shadow of Suspended States
2025
|Screenings and Discussion
|2hrs
by Sophie Ataya, Shuruq Harb, Pary El-Qalqili
In collaboration with Onassis AiR
Screenings and Discussion with
Sophie Ataya
Shuruq Harb
Pary El-Qalqili
Photo credit: Christiane Schmidt
"Tears of tar" a performance by Pary El-Qalqili, 2024
Synopsis
In the decades since the Oslo Accords, many whose lives were meant to be transformed instead find themselves navigating a landscape of unfinished promises, silenced histories, and deferred autonomy. Interrupted Futures: Artists in the Shadow of Suspended States gathers the work of three artists: Sophie Ataya, Shuruq Harb and Pary El-Qalqili whose practices confront the dissonance between hope and arrest, visibility and erasure, voice and censorship.
Through film, these artists expose what has been withheld: the everyday landscapes shaped by occupation, moral constraint, and stalled progress; the internal worlds of memory and intergenerational longing; the hidden and forbidden stories of identity and belonging. Their art refuses to be contained by official silence, by aesthetic norms, or by narratives that demand either compliance or erasure.
Official Poster
Biography
Sophie Ataya is a German-Palestinian writer, director, and film curator based in Berlin. She holds a degree in Middle Eastern Studies (Free University Berlin and Birzeit University, 2019) and is an alumna of the Atelier Ludwigsburg-Paris (2023–24), a prestigious program focused on international (co)production, distribution, and sales at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg, La Fémis in Paris, and NFTS in London. As part of the Atelier program, she produced the short film “Let’s Call It Love,” which premiered in the Max Ophüls Film Festival.
Before shifting to filmmaking, Sophie worked in cultural production with international organizations in Lebanon and Palestine. From 2020 το 2022, she participated in a Documentary Directing program at the self-organized film school FilmArche in Berlin. In her cinematic work, she focuses on (post)migration identities, as well as themes of identity and belonging from a post-migration perspective. Through storytelling, she seeks to amplify underrepresented narratives, using film as a tool for empowerment and anti-colonial practice.
In her curatorial practice, she focuses on contemporary Arab cinema, curating short film programs for various screenings in Berlin and Paris. Through these events, she highlights the power of film to foster community and collective experience.
She has directed and produced a short essay film and is currently developing the script for her first fiction short film. “Who We Are” (working title) is her debut feature documentary.
Sophie Ataya is a participant of the Onassis AiR Extended Research Residencies program for 2025/26.
Shuruq Harb is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, filmmaker, and writer based in Ramallah, Palestine. On the occasion of the Busan Biennale (2024), she presented the first iteration of “Off You Shore Paper Trail”, a collaborative film project with Federica Bueti which looks at modern maritime histories, piracy, and mobility in the Mediterranean Sea. Her latest essay “An Hour Ahead and One Day Behind” was published in kyklàda.press’s latest edition entitled Machine Paralysis, 2025. She is a contributing faculty to PRAXIS: fluent’s Study Programme 2025. She is performing a reworked version of "In the Presence of Absence" at BEK Symposium Nov, 2015. Her exhibition “Interrupted Futures (2026)” opens at Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo in 2026.
Pary El-Qalqili is a writer and director based in Berlin. In her cinematic work, she explores nonlinear narratives that challenge hegemonic storytelling. Looking at life that has been disrupted, uprooted, colonized, and marginalized, she understands fragmentary narrative forms that embrace ruptures, gaps, and irritation as key to decolonize not only our gaze, but also our mind. Her feature “The Turtle’s Rage” has been awarded at international film festivals and had a German cinema release. Her last short film “neighbors,” co-directed with Christiane Schmidt, was nominated for the German Critics Award 2019. She is currently teaching at various institutions, such as Berlin University of Arts; Johann Gutenberg University, Mainz; Barenboim-Said Academy, Berlin; and the self-organized film school Filmarche, also in Berlin.
Pary El-Qalqili is a participant of the Onassis AiR Extended Research Residencies program for 2024/25.
Director's photo
